Electronic commerce over the Internet has become increasingly popular. In one type of electronic commerce, a purchaser accesses a web site of a supplier, from which the purchaser cannot directly purchase items for sale, but can browse items that can be purchased by the supplier's resellers. Frequently, the supplier's web site has links to web sites of the resellers, so that once the purchaser has obtained information about the items he or she wishes to purchase, the purchaser can link to a reseller's web site to purchase the items.
However, as provided by the prior art, this process can be cumbersome for the purchaser, as well as the supplier. Usually, there is no information exchange between the supplier's web site and the resellers' web sites. This means that the purchaser, after browsing the supplier's web site to determine which items to purchase, must manually reselect the items to purchase when he or she links to a desired reseller's web site. For example, even if the supplier's web site provides a shopping cart feature that allows the purchaser to collect a list of items that are desired to be purchased, the purchaser usually has to recollect the list of items to be purchased when he or she links to the desired reseller's web site. In addition, not all resellers may carry all of the supplier's products. This provides for a less than convenient electronic commerce experience for the purchaser. In addition, for the supplier, the supplier must maintain several different systems for different resellers.
For these and other reasons, there is a need for the present invention.